I asked Dave if the spray-painted train was his doing and he told me he always left the same picture when he stayed in a place for a few days. Try as I might, I couldn’t redirect the course of the conversation. He was too drunk, too obsessed with his subject, with his evangelical desire to persuade me of the majesty of trains. His words grew almost unintelligible. Eventually he passed out. When I woke in the morning he was gone. After packing my belongings, I had a last look at the spray-painted locomotive, took a photograph of it, and as I glanced about at the ranks of great pillars, the high concrete arches, the slants of sunlight piercing down from the upper reaches of the interchange, for the first time I recognized how like churches were these all-but-deserted places on the edges of our cities. Like unfinished cathedrals whose congregations have run out of funds and moved on to try their luck elsewhere.
In contemplating this mini-collection, deciding to put together a magazine article with stories derived from the same material, I hoped the process by which the real is transformed into the fictive might be thereby illustrated, at least as regards my own work, and that this relationship might be interesting to certain readers. But in writing this introduction I’ve come to realize that perhaps the most significant function of the book is that it adds a small but hopefully interesting drop to the literature concerning hobos, a sketchy tradition that dates back to the end of the Civil War, when the first hobos, the defeated soldiers of the Confederacy, having no money, no horses, rode the rails en masse in order to return to their homes: You see them in old photographs, like flocks of gray crows inhabiting boxcar after boxcar, all staring listlessly, bleakly out at the world, drunk on blood and dying, an expression whose cousin one can still see today in the faces of train tramps drunk on less potent mixtures. It’s a tradition that’s unlikely to have many more additions. With increasingly effective high-tech security being utilized by the railroad companies, the freight yards are becoming harder and harder to infiltrate, and without access to slow-moving trains, train tramps may become—for all intents and purposes—extinct. According to the viewpoint of law enforcement and of society in general, this will be a good thing. For my part, even though most of the people in America have no awareness of hobos, I think we’ll miss them—I think not having that color running through the veins of the culture will thin our national blood. When I consider my brief time on the rails, I recall initially not scenes of degradation or violence, but the solitudes in which I found myself. Freight routes cover portions of the country never seen by anyone apart from those who ride the trains, and there are places of great beauty that will be forgotten. With no one to look at them, even if only through drunken and corrupted eyes, it will be as if parts of our map have vanished, in a very real sense restoring that map to something resembling the unfinished depiction of the continent that was deemed accurate more than a century ago. I remember, too, the stories I was told. Men grown old before their time, with gray beards, rheumy eyes, and poisoned livers, gazing back along the violent, dissolute corridors of their lives and relating observations and experiences informed by an oddly genteel aesthetic: moments of kindness, of unexpected good fortune, of happy days and boxcar parties that lasted from California to the Dakotas. All that lovely illusion and truth about the freedom of the rails and the inebriated Zen-monk illuminations that attend it…all that will be gone if the freight companies have their way and rid the yards of the derelicts, the dented souls, the human rats who ride the Steel. As will the skinny, million-mile-long city of the rails with its vagrant populace and anarchic laws. It’s a tough place to live, but there are many cities in America that offer fewer cultural rewards.
Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic here. Perhaps sufficient technology will filter down into the hobo jungles and in the near future, cybernetically savvy train tramps will confound heat and motion detectors, slip unseen into the yards and barnacle themselves to robot-driven bullet freights, becoming devotees and celebrants of the New Steel. Probably not. The dissolute nature of hobo life, its fundamental lack of competency, would seem to lobby against this possibility. At the least it’s an idea for another story and maybe in the end that’s what is important. The world is made of stories. A man’s life is a cloud of entangled narratives, and history a wagging tongue. And so as long as there are stories to be told about hobos, they’ll continue in the way we all continue, products of our own myths, heroes in a misperceived and diminutive cause.
The FTRA Story
THE MAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF MISSOULA MIKE has passed out again, slumped onto his side, clutching a nearly empty quart bottle of vodka. His face is haggard, masked by grime and a prophet’s beard gone to gray; his clothes are filthy. He appears to be in his sixties, but just as likely he’s an ill-used forty-five. He coughs, and a wad of phlegm eels from his mouth, nests in the beard. Then, waking, he props himself on an elbow and stares wildly out at me from his lean-to. The glow from our dying campfire deepens his wrinkles with shadow, flares in his eyes, exposes stained teeth, and, ghoulishly underlit, his features resemble those of a Halloween mask, a red-eyed hobo from hell.
“Punk-ass camp thieves!” he says, veering off in a conversational direction that bears no relation to what we’ve been discussing. “They don’t come ’round fuckin’ with me no more.
Six inches of vodka ago, when Mike was capable of rational speech, he promised to reveal the secrets of the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a shadowy gang of rail-riding transients characterized by elements of the press as the hobo mob. In return, he extracted my promise not to use his real name—if I did, he said, he would be subject to reprisals from his gang brothers. But no secrets have been forthcoming. Instead, he has engaged in a lengthy bout of chest beating, threatening other FTRA members who have wronged him and his friends. Now he’s moved on to camp thieves.
“They know Ol’ Double M’s got something for ’em.” He grabs the ax handle he keeps by his side, and takes a feeble swipe at the air to emphasize his displeasure. “Cocksuckers!”
It occurs to me that I’ve talked to a lot of drunks recently, both FTRA members and those who pretend to be FTRA. Articles and TV pieces about the gang have generated a degree of heat on the rails, causing security to tighten in and around the switchyards, and, to avoid police attention, many FTRA members have put aside their colors: bandanas ritually urinated upon by the participants in their individual initiations. However, a number of unaffiliated hobos, seeking a dubious celebrity, have taken to wearing them. Mike has earned a degree of credence with me by keeping his colors in his pack.
We’re in a hobo jungle outside the enormous Union Pacific switchyard at Roseville, California, a place where hobos camp for a day or two until they can hop a freight—a longer stay may attract the interest of the railroad bulls. The darkness is picked out by fires tended by silhouetted figures. Shouts and laughter punctuate the sizzling of crickets, and every so often the moan of a freight train achieves a ghostly dominance. By day, the jungle had the appearance of a seedy campground, lean-tos and sleeping bag nests scattered in among dry-leaved shrubs; but now, colored by my paranoia, it looks like the bottom of the world, a smoky, reeking, Dantean place inhabited by people who have allowed addiction or financial failure or war-related trauma to turn them away from society, men and women whose identities have become blurred by years of telling tall tales, by lying and showing false IDs, in the process creating a new legend for themselves out of the mean fabric of their existence.